The ADO .NET Entity Framework

This article, in an introduction to ADO .NET Entity Framework, Entity Data Model and gives an overview of this great technology.

During the development cycle of a database application, the developer may face issues having to do with the fact that the logical (relational) and related infrastructure may not match the application’s needs. This happens as relational schemas are often normalized in such a way, for being able to be shared across multiple applications.

Still, this does not allow the relational schemas to be somehow “aware” of the business concept of the database application. As a result, developers often find themselves in the position of trying to remember whether a database table is called Employee or Employees, how the employees of the various departments are separated within the same table and so on. This requires going over the database’s schema diagram repeatedly which is a task consuming valuable time.

The ADO .NET Entity Framework provides a solution to this problem by allowing the creation of conceptual models mapped to the corresponding relational models. In order to understand the concept of the ADO .NET Entity Framework, first you have to understand what the Entity Data Model is. This is actually the core concept of the Entity Framework.

The Entity Data Model (EDM) is a conceptual model of problem space. It introduces an object model which is independent of any storage considerations. Within this model the Entity is introduced. An entity is an instance of an Entity Type (i.e. an SQL Server Database Table). Entities can contain relational database types (e.g. int, varchar) as well as multi-property types (e.g. address). Entities are grouped in Entity-Sets. EDM also introduces Relationships. Relationships associate entities and are grouped in Relationship-Sets.

The ADO .NET Entity Framework technology features an architecture where there are the ADO .NET Data Providers which provide access to the various DBMSs and on top of these there is the EntityClient Data Provider which is very similar to an ordinary .NET provider. This provider’s “database” is the Entity Data Model. This allows Object Services which is on top of the abovementioned components, to support various levels of access and services to the conceptual schema like: Change Tracking, Object Identity, Overriding INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE with stored procedures, Column-level concurrency for updates, System.Transactions or explicit transactions. Object Services also support LINQ to Entities which is a very powerful way for querying the conceptual model.

High Level Procedure for Using ADO .NET Entity Framework

A simple procedure of using the ADO .NET Entity Framework is the following:

1. Connect to a DBMS via an ADO .NET Provider.
2. Create the conceptual model (EDM) by mapping database entities to conceptual entities.

Then, you can access/query the conceptual model either by using Entity SQL (a special version of SQL language containing certain extensions), or by using Object Services, or by using LINQ to Entities. The latter is a very powerful way of accessing the conceptual model because it provides all the benefits that LINQ offers like: compile-time syntax checking, intellisense and much more!

Now, if the relational model (database) and/or the mappings change, this will not be a problem for the developer as he/she will still be able to query the same conceptual entities without requiring to change anything in the code!

Please keep in mind that for being able to use the ADO .NET Entity Framework you will need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 and Visual Studio 2008 or later.

SQL Server provides significant support and many features for use with the ADO .NET Entity Framework. More information can be found on this link.

There is also excellent online documentation regarding the ADO .NET Entity Framework and LINQ to Entities. More information is available on this MSDN Library link.